The Iliad is a book-length poem about a war between the Mycenaean Greeks, called “Achaeans,” and a certain city-state on the western coast of Asia Minor. This city is called Ilium (and the poem therefore “the Iliad”), or Troy. It is a foundational text and story for classical, Western culture, and has been deeply influential on Christians since the early days of the Church.
The poem was composed by a blind bard named Homer in about 750 BC and written down shortly thereafter using the brand new Greek alphabet, but the story had been sung by poets for many generations before. The setting is the end of the era historians now call the Late Bronze Age, with c. 1200 as a point of reference. Most such historians believe that the Iliad has some basis in historical events, that it represents a foggy, distant, highly mythologized memory of a war, or series of wars, between inhabitants of Mycenaean Greece and the western coast of Anatolia.
This sketch of a timeline should be important to students of the Bible who read the Iliad. Have a look at the “Biblical Chronology and World History” section at the front of The Lutheran Study Bible. On page xcvii, in the column furthest to the left, you will find that Troy was violently destroyed at c. 1275 BC (it was actually destroyed more than once, perhaps by Greeks, perhaps by others, perhaps by natural disasters). From this point on, as you follow the timeline through the rest of the page and onto the next, you will find that the majority of nations surrounding Israel go through hard times until about 900 BC. The Hittite capital of Hattusa is burned and its empire is no more. Egypt is diminished and weak. The Mycenaean culture—the Greek Achaeans of the Iliad—collapses. Historians call the period in Greece that follows the Greek Dark Ages, and they call the decline of civilizations that affected all the empires of the Mediterranean—Assyria to Egypt—the Late Bronze Age Collapse; some think this Collapse was more consequential for world history than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Before we turn directly to the subject of this essay, the Iliad, you should notice one last thing about this timeline: only in Israel do fortunes change for the better from 1200 to 900 BC. Shortly after the collapse of Mycenaean culture, Israel experiences its brief golden age under David and Solomon. As Solomon’s kingdom divides after his death, Assyria ominously revives.
To summarize: the Iliad was written down just as Greece is emerging from its Dark Ages (c. 1100-800 BC). The poem is set in an Age of Heroes before the Dark Ages. In the mythology of the poem, the Age of Heroes is coming to an end with the Trojan War; outside of myth, in archaeology and history, the splendors of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean world are coming to an end at the same time, c. 1200 BC. Homer is rhapsodizing for his contemporaries in c. 750 BC a world which to him was already a long-vanished, more glorious time.
All of this is background for the real action of the story. The poem begins after the war between the Achaeans and the Trojans has been raging for years. The Achaeans have invaded the land around the city and have besieged it, but have been stymied by the bravery of the Trojans and the huge walls of the city. Homer begins the story, according to Robert Fagles’ (1990) recommended translation, thus:
Rage–Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
…great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds…
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. (Book 1:1-8)
So, the poem is specifically about the rage of the warrior Achilles, and the story begins with his clash not with the Trojans, but with the leader of the Achaeans, Agamemnon. Achilles believes himself slighted by Agamemnon regarding a captured maiden from a Troy-allied town. Enraged, he refuses to fight any more for the Achaeans, leaving them without their best warrior. The Trojans then press the Achaeans into a desperate position, fighting to save their ships on the beach. The tide turns when Patroclus, Achilles’ dearest friend, puts on Achilles’ armor, disguising himself as Achilles to rally the Achaeans and drive back the Trojans. Patroclus, though, is struck down by Hector, the champion of Troy. This death turns Achilles’ rage from Agamemnon to Hector, and he prepares for battle in new armor from the gods. The story reaches its climax as Achilles and Hector join in single combat outside the walls of Troy. Hector is slain by Achilles, and the victor drags the body of his victim back to camp. He continues to abuse the body through the many days of funeral games for Patroclus and only agrees to return Hector to his family for burial after the intervention of the gods and the personal pleading of King Priam of Troy, Hector’s father. The narrative concludes with Hector’s funeral.
Perhaps unexpectedly for those who know the story of the Trojan War, Homer’s text does not begin with the theft of Helen from her Mycenaean husband by the Trojan prince, Paris, though this inciting cause is referred to elsewhere in the poem. Likewise, the Iliad does not include the story of the wooden horse by means of which the Greeks enter and destroy the city; this will have to wait until the poem’s two most famous sequels. Both the city and Achilles, however, are understood to be doomed at the end of the story. The gods of the Greek pantheon are involved in all of this and, though they capriciously choose sides against each other, on the side of Greeks or Trojans, the fate of Ilium and its enemies cannot be avoided.
But why should any Christian care about any of this? What has the Bronze Age mindset, which lives by and for its own glory, to do with the Jerusalem from above, which lives by faith and love?
Christians have wrestled with the question of what to do with the literature of antiquity for a long time, and have offered varied answers. Here, I’ll suggest two ways that Christian readers can profitably digest the Iliad. The first way deals only with the story itself, the second reads it under the shadow of the Bible; both have to do with a major theme of the poem, namely heroism.
First, I would point to the surprising conjunction of heroism and humanity in the Iliad. Not everyone presented as a hero is truly heroic, nor do the real heroes always behave heroically. Sometimes honor is most clearly displayed in its opposite, as when Achilles refuses to return the body of the vanquished Hector to his family, and instead drags the corpse behind his chariot around the funeral bier of his darling Patroclus. But then the relentless Achilles relents when confronted with the love of a father for his son, as Priam entreats him for the body of Hector:
Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house. (Book 24: 592-599)
This catharsis, after which Achilles releases the body of his enemy to Priam, is not merely a detail to tie up a loose end. Insofar as the Iliad is the story of what Achilles’ feelings have wrought for friend and foe, his turn from rage to humane pity is the completion of his arc within the story and the conclusion of the human drama of the story itself.
Is heroism deformed or completed in this humanity, by tears and compassion? Or, are the Greek poets straining for something in their stories that no human hero can actually embody? Many such examples in Homer raise these questions.
Now, to read the Iliad profitably in light of the Bible, I suggest you first re-read the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. As you hear Goliath say to David, “I will give your flesh to the birds of the and to the beasts of the field” (1 Sam. 17:44), recall the Iliad: “Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles…that…made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds.” The transformation of Bronze Age aggression-glory into Christian courage begins with David’s response to the spirit of Goliath and Achilles: “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied….that all this assembly may know that the LORD saves not with sword and spear” (1 Sam. 17:44-47).
The Greek heroic spirit fights to immortalize itself by the greatness of its works, but the Spirit driving David strives to establish the Kingdom of God by the power of God. Invoke this Spirit and power for yourself, the true Muse of holy history, and follow Him through to the enthronement of David’s Son: “The Lord Jesus Christ, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them” (Mk. 16:19-20). Now go out with these Apostles and their Gospel into the Greco-Roman world, built by Homer, Alexander the Great, and Caesar Augustus, and watch as Bronze Age perversions are made into a footstool for David’s Son and Lord (Ps. 110:1; Mt. 22:41-46).I’ve heard it said outright here and there that what we need today is more heroism, a more heroic form of Christianity. There is plenty of dauntless grit and audacity within and without the walls of Ilium, and here, if we squint, perhaps we can see glimpses of David, and in him of Christ, and herein find resources to make us anxious for the fray. But let all rage be tempered by the humanity that even Homer knew, and as Achilles dons the armor forged by the god Hephaestus, remember the panoply of our own true God, wearing which we stand not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual forces over this present darkness (Eph. 6:10-20).
